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Spinning audiences back to the mid-1970s, UFA Fiction’s latest period series “Disko 76” is set in a pivotal time in the industrial heartland of West Germany as a new American pop music craze takes over the airwaves and dance floors.

The six-part series, which premiered at the recent Berlinale Series Market, continues its international rollout at Series Mania in Lille before bowing on the Rtl+ streaming platform on March 28 and on Rtl Group channel Nitro on April 1.

UFA Fiction quickly won over Rtl+ with the idea from former UFA Fiction producer Benjamin Benedict of a family story set in the disco era, says fellow producer Sinah Swyter.

Boasting classic hits from the likes of Donna Summer, Abba, Kool and the Gang, Boney M. and many more, the series follows Doro (Luise Aschenbrenner), a rebellious young woman constricted by married life who finds freedom with the arrival of disco...

Though little known in the English-speaking world, Erich Kästner’s slim novel originally translated in 1932 as “Fabian. The Story of a Moralist” is a brilliantly astute rendering of life in Weimar Berlin, straightforward and yet surreal, witty and perverse. To tackle it in cinema would seem like an impossible task, and while Dominik Graf’s “Fabian – Going to the Dogs” is to be commended for getting quite a lot right, the movie is blowsy where the book is succinct, awkwardly paced and portentous where Kästner is consistently rhythmical and unpretentious. Set in a teetering world of dissoluteness and disillusion in which a good man without professional ambition awakens to life’s promise only to have it all torn away, the story has modern resonances that Graf (“The Beloved Sisters” among many others) keenly underlines, and while the film’s core is affectingly developed, the rest tries too hard to expose...